


making a pro-con list

by zalzaires



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, scarecrow: year one, seriously mary keeny should be as much warning you need, though she's not actually onscreen so that's good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-01
Updated: 2013-09-01
Packaged: 2017-12-25 07:00:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/950094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zalzaires/pseuds/zalzaires
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After seizing control of his life for the first time, the young Jonathan Crane realizes he might have a chance at something so abstract as a future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	making a pro-con list

**Author's Note:**

> Set shortly after the death of Mary Keeny as depicted in Scarecrow: Year One. I tend to estimate Jonathan's age at the time as par with Robin's during the 'currently happening' parts of the comic - whatever that age might be. Either middle school or early high school.
> 
> If you've never read that comic, you're going to be majorly confused, sorry!

There were both ups and downs to living alone.

In his stubborn estimation, of course there were far more of the former to the latter - admitting anything different would be a betrayal to himself and his hard-won freedom. The thought of what he'd done, gotten away with, was still getting away with always gave him a thrill, heart beating rapid in his chest like a small, chemically-compelled bird. A finch, maybe. He felt more keen on finches nowadays, a warm-fuzzy fondness that came out like sunlight busting through clouds every time he pictured the stark black eyepatch on that so-called toll-taker's face. The beating that came with it hadn't been fun, but bruises healed - lost eyes didn't.

Jonathan supposed he was lucky that his love of - appropriate revenge, that was a good name for it - wasn't shared. He already had to squint to read the blackboard. He couldn't imagine doing it with only one eye would make things any easier. But he was fighting a losing battle on that one, because loathe as he was to admit it, he couldn't afford to flounder in class and glasses were becoming an obvious necessity. It was his mind that had got him this far, and he swore it would be what would get him the rest of the way out of Arlen - but not if he started looking stupid because he couldn't read the arcane squiggles the teacher excused as math problems.

Now was the first time he'd ever really thought about the future, about things like needing glasses. The first time he'd had the luxury, really - without Granny hanging constantly overhead like the wrath of her old testament God, he could afford to broaden his mental scope from the narrow confines of 'avoid punishment, sneak books, till fields.' The liberation of it was exhilarating. This was what seizing power for himself wrought: control, and so many options of what to do with it.

But anyway. Ups and downs.

The isolated lifestyle Mary Keeny had crafted for herself was a sure boon to her great-grandson-and-murderer-by-proxy. She sent him to buy anything they needed from town and didn't have, anyway - with exact change, unwilling to relinquish the monetary control he could have harvested for himself by caching spared pennies, one by one. Or she was unwilling to waste what little money they had. Jonathan preferred to assume the more consciously evil of the two options: it was more likely to be correct, and it was vindictively cathartic. The first major hurdle he'd met after her death was finding where she hid the money.

He'd briefly entertained the thought that she might have kept the bulk of it on her person, in a small, concealable purse of some sort - but even if she had, he adamantly ruled that he would rather starve to death than ever go into the chapel to check. Besides, he didn't really need money to stay alive. There were more than just chemistry books to learn from in the forbidden room, and technically, you could eat kudzu, right?

Then the power went off, and he abruptly recalled how utilities worked.

At least now, he didn't have to waste long hours of his days keeping the fields in check: sure, they brought income, but on a painfully slow basis that required communicating with outside people at a level above what he could get away with alone. He was fortunately at the age where taking a part-time job was common, even for blacklisted 'freakos' like Scarecrow Crane. If he was careful, crafty, and oh-so stumblingly polite about it, there was always something in Arlen that needed to be done.

He was already developing a new, distinct distaste for sucking up to anyone. It was so.. it was such an obvious way of letting go of control. But it had been an integral part of his survival routine before, playing to Granny's rules of etiquette. He could endure niceties - and from a certain point of view, wasn't sweet-talking someone into putting up with you, even if you despised them and everything they stood for, another way of exerting control over them? Just, a lot less blatant?

In the giant house, deserted and quiet but for himself and the scuttling rats, he could now do a whole lot of arguing things like this in his head - punctuated only by the typical creaks of an old building, he would commandeer the only armchair he'd found that could comfortably hold his bony, awkward frame, and for long hours think. Oh, sure, he read outrageous amounts of books every single day - but this deliberate and undirected pondering was luxuriously alien to him. He thought about the future, how he felt about having to be polite to people he didn't like, whether he might set fire to the aviary one day, whether he could find where the stash of votary candles (surely immense, if Granny's stories of service every day in the glorified cage was remotely true) might be... he pondered his infinite stretch of options with the aimless delight of someone who finds themselves suddenly with much more free time than they're used to, and thus squanders it. But if you were to ask Jonathan, he wouldn't have thought it was squandering at all.


End file.
